Prediction-based channel assignment for minimizing channel switching in mobile WBANs

As the world’s population rises, the healthcare system experiences significant changes. Wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging technology that has considerable impact on medical and non-medical applications. However, two crucial challenges in WBANs are interference minimization and channel assignment. High interference may increase collision probability, transmission delay, and energy consumption. Multichannel schemes are proposed to reduce the data transmission latency and improve the system throughput by allowing simultaneous transmission of sensors in coexisting WBANs. When WBAN users move, they need to switch the channels frequently to avoid potential channel conflicts and to maintain the Quality of Service (QoS). However, frequent switching may raise energy consumption and aggravate delay. Existing multichannel assignment schemes failed to perform well in highly dynamic and densely deployed WBANs environments. In contrast to existing studies, this paper proposes a Prediction-based Channel Assignment (PCA) algorithm that selects the channels for WBANs to remain valid for future time instances and thus minimizes the delay and number of channel switches for dynamic and coexisting WBANs. When a WBAN needs to switch a channel, the proposed method predicts the future neighbors of that WBAN based on its history. It explores the channel information of present and future neighbors to select a suitable channel with higher resilience in a dynamic environment. Thus, our algorithm minimizes channel interference by avoiding unnecessary channel switching. We have used machine learning algorithms to predict the future neighbors of a WBAN. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than an existing algorithm and random channel assignment in delay and throughput.